Notes From Camp

She finished 4th grade, finished another soccer season, performed in the end-of-the-year piano recital. She's nine going on ten going on seventeen and we're technically required to call her a fifth-grader now. She has braces. She was awarded the "Fantastic Friend" award by her teacher at school, and "Best Technical Skills" award by her soccer coach, whatever that means. She's had an iPod touch for a year or so, for music and a camera and silly games, and she lobbied us for months to enable the texting feature, which we finally did this week on a trial basis with much trepidation and after multiple conversations about Responsibility and Trust and The Internet is Forever, so now she and her friend can use all the emoji while they text about which headband they'll wear the following day.

Also, she's at camp.

Camp, as in sleepaway, as in we dropped her off on Sunday and haven't spoken a word to her since. I didn't think this would be a big deal for me, since I've definitely been away from her for much longer periods of time (I pick her up tomorrow), and I know she's with three of her bestest friends, and I loved camp myself at exactly her age. But the complete lack of communication has thrown me -- can't I get a 60-second phone call: "Everything good? You're having fun? I love you!" -- and the house is so very quiet without her in it.

Not that the absence is all bad. Because in spite of the fact that she can still pass time by coloring, possibly still believes in fairies and Santa, and spent a big chunk of her first day of summer vacation playing an invented game with Jemma involving scooters, maple seeds, a sidewalk-chalk-drawn map on the driveway, and bad guys, she's moving into the teen-ish years more quickly than I can believe. The last week of school, she had an honest-to-goodness fit about her hair, which looked exactly the same as it has looked every other day of the last year, and declared it "square" and ripped her headband out and threw it on the ground. For the first time this school year, she actually got a little worked up about tests ("Quiz me on the state capitals one last time, Mom!") and she started faux-complaining about a boy or two in her class. I brought her to one of Ben's lacrosse games and after the game was over the two of them had a few moments of painful awkwardness, complete with strange voices and total lack of eye contact, before they remembered that they're friends who have known one another since they were born and went on talking and laughing as usual. She's moody and talks back and stomps off and is 100 percent a tween.

Before she left on Sunday, Jason and I tucked a few notes into the clothes she had packed in her duffel bag for her to find later. It was Father's Day, and as I was hiding a little blue note among her t-shirts, I  was remembering the way my dad used to do the same thing for me each year. I don't remember what a single one of his notes said -- I wish I had one still now -- but I can easily envision his spidery, all-caps handwriting and the little smiley face he always drew.

On Sunday, I had talked to him on the phone earlier that day, and he told Annie to have a great time at camp, and I wish I had remembered to talk about the notes with him when I wished him happy Father's Day. I always loved finding them, always felt loved and treasured when I thought about my dad remembering to tuck them in. As Annie grows up and away from us (grades and boys and camp and texts), more and more I think our role is to step back and watch her learn (and try, and fail, and try again) while we coach and encourage from the sidelines. I kind of can't believe I'm the person tucking the notes into the camp duffel, but I'm hoping she remembers it on a day next week or next year when she "hates" us, and maybe again in 20 or 30 years, when she's doing it for her kids.

And I can't wait to go get her tomorrow.

Beatrice

My grandma passed away yesterday. She was my mom's mom, the grandma I was closest to growing up. The one who had us over for sleepovers and let us shoot BB guns off the back porch at leftover utility line flags. The one with a huge backyard with a clothesline and a basement with spare bedrooms where my brother and I slept. The one who loved crossword puzzles and spoke German and Dutch and wrote me long letters from Florida in the winter, with spidery handwriting and drawings of the layout of their condo and maybe five or ten dollars inside. The one who was always doing dishes or wiping the counter. The one who served Ritz crackers and Schuler's bar cheese on Sundays when we went for coffee after church, who poured me iced tea out of a brown Tupperware pitcher. The one who came to all my birthday parties, hosted our Christmas Eve gatherings, went on our annual summer camping trip, cooked me the best fried potatoes ever with the container of bacon grease she kept under the sink. The one who came to the hospital to hold baby Annie on her first day of life. The one who canned peaches and pears and made strawberry jam and drove a school bus for disabled kids.

She was smart, stubborn, fastidious, faithful, and serious, though I remember her laughing a lot too. She drank coffee from morning to night. She smelled like lipstick and lotion. She had Alzheimer's, like her own mother did, and she hasn't been the same grandma to me for at least five years now. I brought her flowers and ate cake with her on her birthday in October. I saw her last weekend and I was stunned. She was less like my grandmother and more like a baby bird, lying in bed, unable to talk, unable to eat, opening her eyes off and on when we spoke to her or held her hand. For the last week, the image has been with me as I go about all the things I go about. As I was falling asleep, I was thinking My grandma is dying. As I stretched my hamstrings in downward dog, I was thinking My grandma is dying. As I hugged and kissed the girls when they got home from school, I was thinking My grandma is dying. As I took a bite of food, laughed with a friend, wrote an article, drove my car, shoveled snow, talked to my mom on the phone, read to my daughter before bed: My grandma is dying.

And now she's gone. She leaves behind my grandpa, her husband of 64 years, a number that is incomprehensible to me, and her four children, her grandchildren, her great-grandchildren. I am at once guiltily relieved that she is no longer suffering in that bed and incredibly sad that she is no longer in the world with me. I'll never hold her hand again. I'll never smell her smell. Two months ago, I still had both my grandmas; now I have neither.

I have friends who have lost parents, siblings, unborn children. This -- me losing my grandparents in their 80s and 90s -- is not particularly tragic, I know. It's simply sad. So for today, I'm trying to get down the good memories as best I can before they fade. I'm trying to find the threads of these two beautiful, smart, funny, strong, stubborn women in myself and in my girls. I'm trying to remember that, in the word of a favorite, Ray Bradbury, "no person ever died that had a family."

"Important thing is not the me that's lying here, but the me that's sitting on the edge of the bed looking back at me, and the me that's downstairs cooking supper, or out in the garage under the car, or in the library reading. All the new parts, they count. I'm not really dying today. No person ever died that had a family. I'll be around a long time. A thousand years from now a whole township of my offspring will be biting sour apples in the gumwood shade." - Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

Sixteen Years On

At about this moment in 1996, Jason and I were on our first date. Actually, by this time, he was probably dropping me off in front of my dorm then pulling away in his gray Honda Civic that was missing a passenger-side rearview mirror. He made a mix tape for the date (though he didn't tell me at the time) so that he could impress me with his great taste in music while we drove to Grand Rapids and back. I can't remember a single song on the tape, but I bet he could.

Today (many many years later), it's been packing lunches and making dinner, piano lessons and math test review, kindergarten sight words and paying bills, grocery shopping and working out, haircuts and watering window boxes. No mix tape, just the sound of the dishwasher humming away, the crickets out the open window, the kitties romping around the house to fight over a milk jug ring, the television on in the living room.

(We got kitties on Saturday - two tabby brothers who have already stolen our hearts. What can we say? Our children finally broke us.)

Sixteen years later, it's less glamorous and heart-fluttery, that's for sure, but it's more solid and comforting, too. I love these ordinary days. I wouldn't trade them, not even the kitty litter.

End of an Era

Since September of 2007, I've spent a chunk of every school year driving someone to preschool. On Monday, I did it for the last time ever.

I still remember exactly how the first day of preschool went for Annie. I had never dropped one of my babies off at school before. Jemma was only eight months old, still in the infant car seat, when we brought Annie into her classroom and I hugged her good-bye. I went home, cried a little, put Jemma down for her morning nap, and cleaned the heck out of a bathroom (even bleaching the bath toys) with no "helpers" in sight.

I cried a little on Monday, too. Jemma stayed to play on the playground for a few minutes after I picked her up, then we walked out to our car and let the gate swing shut behind us for the last time. She skipped ahead, her bag full of a journal that shows just how far she's come this year: her self-portrait, once a circle with legs coming right out of the chin, is now adorably accurate as body parts go; her letters, once backwards, are now formed neatly and correctly; the words she knows how to read now uncountable. She's ready, surely, for kindergarten in the fall. But I'm going to miss the sweet mornings at the happy school in the red brick church.

The Gamble(r)

Tonight as we were all riding bikes back from Wilcox Park (where we'd done enough swinging and merry-go-rounding for one night), Jason yelled back to me, "Hey! Guess what today is the anniversary of?" It took me a minute, I admit, as I was watching Annie's scrawny legs pump herself up a hill, but then I knew: fourteen years ago right around that time, Jason was asking me to marry him. (Awwww.)

Now that I'm in my mid-thirties, life seems to be presenting a few new situations: having zits and wrinkles at the same time, hand-wringing over work/family balance (or returning to said career after a hiatus), watching our metabolism crap out on us and leave us with five constantly-extra pounds, and watching acquaintances and neighbors go through divorce. I've had two (freshly divorced) people lament to me recently that they should never have gotten married so young. I nodded and smiled and did not for a second consider confessing that I got engaged when I was NINETEEN.

Who knows, really, why we're going on almost thirteen happy years together and those people aren't. All I know is that we probably had no business getting married so young, and yet this morning I stood in my kitchen and bawled while I watched Fun. sing "The Gambler" on YouTube, and yet tonight we biked around town with our little family and thought for one moment about a lucky night fourteen years ago.

Girls in White Dresses with Blue Satin Sashes

Annie's first communion was last weekend, and despite my trepidation leading up to the event, it was sweet, appropriate, and meaningful. She was beautiful - angelic, even - and she seemed to like being the center of attention for the day, a flurry of cousins around her, cards and gifts being showered on her, and a fancy outfit to boot. I watched her reading a card aloud to the whole family after brunch, and then I watched her read the opening welcome to the entire church at the beginning of mass, and I thought: who is this poised, confident, charming little lady? We were understandably pretty proud of her, our little Anna Catherine.

Tooth!

Going . . .

going . . .

gone!

And the note she wrote the Tooth Fairy to accompany the tooth when she puts it under her pillow tonight: